Huskies ready for NCAA play

By Ben Miller

Dec 1, 2004, 12:00 AM

The Washington volleyball team starts its run at a national championship with first-round NCAA Tournament action Friday. The Huskies (24-2 overall, 16-2 PAC-10) won their first Pac-10 title outright after defeating UCLA 3-1 Saturday. "When you win a Pac-10 title and you set a win streak, those are significant and have a ton of meaning," coach Jim McLaughlin said. "It was gratification for hard work, and something to appreciate, but meaning comes when you win a national title." The conference title comes four years after McLaughlin arrived at the UW, and during that time he has guided the Huskies to their third straight NCAA appearance, including last year's run to the Elite Eight. "I think we can do this on a regular basis," he said. "People thought I was a little bit crazy when I talked like this four years ago, but we set some standards and then all we ever talked about after that was just having an appropriate approach every day and how we would do that." Already receiving an automatic bid from winning the conference, Washington learned Sunday that it will be entering the 2004 NCAA Division Championship Tournament as the No. 7 seed in the tournament, playing in the West Region. Being ranked No. 1 for most of the season, there was some surprise at being seeded as low as seventh, but junior Brie Hagerty saw positives in the Huskies' position. "Just because you are a seventh seed doesn't mean you are going to finish seventh," she said. "They are just seeds, and if we were any other seed we wouldn't have gotten to play at home." The Huskies host first and second-round action beginning Friday when they face Idaho with the winner battling either Kansas or Santa Clara in the second round Sunday. Right now, McLaughlin is concerned only about his team. "We're going to address what we need to address, and we're not going to be thinking about them too much," McLaughlin said. Washington is in the position of never leaving campus until the national semifinals in Long Beach, Calif. as it also hosts West Regional play Dec. 10-11. The UW is 6-1 all-time in postseason games played in Seattle and lost only one match this year at Hec Edmundson Pavilion -- 3-2 to USC last Friday. "We are excited about getting to host with this crowd," senior Sanja Tomasevic said. "It feels great to play in front of this crowd, and we don't have to travel and we can just keep doing what we're used to."

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